George RR Martin & the GOT Bag

Norwescon hosts this awesome contest every year called the "Single Pattern Contest" and a few years back, Dejathoris swept all the awards by making this spectacular bag out of leather entirely dedicated to George R. R. Martin's Game of Thrones. Let me break the bag down for you for a moment:

 The three house sigils are hand drawn, carved and painted with the coordinating house words underneath.

On the opposite side the maps were transferred by citrasolve but had to be burned in as the citrasolve transfer was too light. The Kings Landing and Iron Throne were free hand burned in. 

She then added some of the most iconic oaths in the series. 

So why am I telling you all about this now? 1) Because the GoT bag is freaking awesome and 2) Because this past weekend Dejathoris headed down to our favorite Con to get the man himself to sign it! 

Apparently after powering through a million books and other amazing memorabilia he PAUSED, INSPECTED THE BAG and then asked "So where do you want me to defile this?" HOW GREAT IS THAT????

I don't know what else to say but EEEEEEEEEE!!!!!

Steampunk - Indira

Pure Spec 2011

For Pure Speculation Edmonton (also known as PureSpec) we decided to try our hand at Steampunk. We spent endless hours extending the lengths of our creativity making three individually unique and personally reflective costumes. Since then, we've been able to wear these at several different events and even broadened our Steampunk assortment to include interchangable accessories. I'm going to split them out into three posts as we took lots and lots of pictures of our processes (yet only have one clear shot of each of us?!?!) I'm also going to focus on the original version of our outfits so that I try and stay on track.

Indira AKA Mrs Spiderman @Calgary Expo 2012

This post will probably be updated with better shots as time goes on, but the best place to look is our Flickr account....


What I really wanted to do here was create a cosplay outfit that works with my heritage...  Translation? I wanted to take a Sari and stick a crap ton of gears all over it. We started with coming up with backstories for our characters. Since Steampunk lit is mostly based in Europe and some of the Americas, we decided that Indira was an International Assassin. We made a bunch of weapons hoping that some of them would work with the esthetic.

Flash? What's a flash?

The outfit itself is Sari fabric we picked up at our local shop. We also picked up a complimenting golden orange taffeta fabric to fill out the skirt. Even though it's Sari material, it ended up looking more like a Lengha-styled outfit. Or at least what I think a Lengha would probably look like in the Steamunk timeline. When shopping for Saris, they will usually come with a length of material you can turn into a blouse. This will also have matching border pieces you can use to tie the outfit together. Mine unfortunately didn't have enough border to do all the areas I wanted so I settled on the neckline only.

Over the course of this endeavour, we checked out a lot of con floors selling Steampunk clothes and accessories. Once you check out two or three you will start to see some similar basic stock. You've got to keep an eye our for people that either sell the basic wares, like goggles for $10-$14 that you can then individualize, or people that have already done so but be willing to spend the $$. This is a LOT of detailed work and they do deserve to be compensated for it. We've found quite a few sellers online, but over time many have switched from offering goods direct to the consumer to retailers only (sad panda)... If you find a clearance sale, and you want to build up your steampunk wardrobe, purchase a few right then and there! You will be much happier.

Back on track, while searching through our local thrift stores we came across this really worn our red leather jacket. The colouring was perfect to compliment Indira's outfit. We turned this into a harness and gauntlets. The gauntlets have then the small amount of the excess blouse material added to tie the whole outfit together. One another note, I'd like to point out that gears are really sharp and whenever I forget to wear the gauntlets, I ultimatley get scratched to bits by all the gears all over my outfit.

Here comes the detail work... I purchased some watch parts from a few different Etsy sellers who were selling supplies. I then sorted out all the same size gears and glued one on every.single.flower. I am really proud of this work and if you compliment me while I'm wearing my Indira outfit, that is ALWAYS the first thing to come out of my mouth! This is where the gauntlets protect me the most. From my own skirt. I then hand stitched some chain around the skirt to give it some more dimension. There are two rounds of chain on the skirt itself. Its not something that photographs well, but reads really well in person.

Finally the goggles... I found a pair of ski goggles (what do you expect? It's Calgary). I spray painted the exterior gold. I cut off the band and attached some of the leftover leather from the harness (matchy matchy!)... Then on the goggles piece itself, I used some complimenting lace I cut off from one of my old shirts. I used some Modge Podge and adhered it. The extra "ocular" piece is actually a cut up cap from a creamer container. I then inserted a light inside for some extra dimension. Around the goggles itself I glued some accents: gears, hat pins and the

like. I really loved working on these pieces.Randomly gluing things all over the place was really fun. I wouldn't be surprised if I did this to more things in my home... It's addictive...

I've played around with my makeup each time, but the one things I really like to do is replace the traditional Bindi with a gear. I know that irritates some people but I enjoy it. And at the end of the day, I'm the one wearing it!

I keep searching for more international-inspired Steampunk ideas, so if there are any out there that I've missed I'd love to hear about them!

The Importance of Finishing! - Leatherwork

You might notice that a lot of my pictures involve close up of edges and ends and what not... It's because I'm trying to show all those edges and ends with and without finishing techniques. They take forever, and some times they're a huge pain, but the end result is very much so worth it! Edit: Apparently writing all our finishing techniques is taking a long time too, so I'm splitting it up into different parts. Below are some of our Leather techniques!

When The Costume Guild headed out to our first con, Norwescon 34 in Seattle, WA, we brought our Dune costumes with the plans to dress up for the Saturday evening party. We decided on Friday night to enter the Costume contest instead. So we spent most of the day hanging out with other panicked costumers and some extremely over confident ones... And we learned about a little category called Workmanship. Workmanship is where they essentially look over your entire costume and look at all your techniques. Whether or not you're interested in entering a costume contest, we realized that a little extra workmanship goes a long long way. So I'm going to try and detail some of the techniques we've started using:



- Finishing your edges: When working on Perseus's Skirt, Dejathoris pointed out how much nicer the skirt edges would look if I took the bevel out and ran it along the edges.... Yes, yes indeed it looked better. But it was a pain in the @$$. So when you're taking on a bigger endeavor, you must take into consideration how to make your project look it's best, even if it takes you an extra 10-20 minutes it could mean the difference in your overall look!

- Sealing your Dyes: If you don't seal your dyes, prepare to get paint ALL OVER YOU. This is also the case with many types of spray paint on plastic but I will get to that in a moment. In leather shops like Tandy, you can get a sealant that's a paint or an aerosol spray. Each has a different kind of purpose and intent. I LOVE the spray for awkward angles and many of our projects like our Masks for NYE2011, but the paint was really good on finishing Perseus' (again). On NYE2011, Dejathoris made custom fit leather masques for herself and newly named Mr Dejathoris. To ensure that the dyes did not transfer to their faces, I believe she used the aerosol finishing spray. When we were painting/dying Perseus' leather, we actually used a stain rather than a dye. A dye would have resulted in too finished of a look, so we opted for a stain (more on that in the Perseus' post though). We then mixed some of the stain with the finish, because the finish alone ate away half our paint, resulting in it looking more "unfinished" rather than "worn". We liked the layered look, however we could have also opted for the aerosol to hold true to the look of the dye. 




- Rivets: "ARGH RIVETS" or a friendly frog sounding "Rivet" are two of the most common expressions around our working areas. Rivets can be really, really tough when they want to be, or easy as pie when you've finally figured it out. The key is figuring out how wide the leather/fabric/Wunderflex really is before guessing. Our most common problem was that we were trying to use rivets that were too big, therefore we'd end up with a half-dozen broken rivets and nothing to show for it! Also, this may sound silly, but make sure you're attaching your rivet in the right direction. Because prying off a rivet or a snap that's in the wrong direction is another massive, massive pain!